


The Continuity of Ducks

by withyr_wyther



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Dark Thirteenth Doctor, Gen, Martha Jones Is a Star, Martha Jones deserved better, Mentioned River Song, Mentioned Rose Tyler, Non linear time, Time War Angst, cereal as a plot device, disorienting on purpose, everybody just really loves cereal, general confusion, the doctor has a past
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28494588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withyr_wyther/pseuds/withyr_wyther
Summary: The sun set and rose again.The Doctor stepped away, rubbing her eyes leaving fuzzed afterimages of muddy blues and greens that faded within milliseconds. Outside, she could hear the crashing of waves against the shore. They didn’t live near the water, did they? She stumbled out of the bathroom feeling once again that this place was wrong.Some thing here was seriously, seriously wrong and she couldn’t even think enough to see it.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Martha Jones, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Kudos: 1





	The Continuity of Ducks

**Author's Note:**

> bold of you to assume I can comprehend the days of the week, let alone the passage of time

It was noon, and Yaz walked down the street. She didn’t need to pay attention to the shining pastel-colored storefronts on her way to pick up milk. It wasn’t that they weren’t pretty, or that if this had been Sheffield Yaz would have lingered at each window to appreciate the displays and would have spent minutes debating whether or not to step in and see what the rest of the shop was like before inevitably moving on. They just simply weren’t important enough to notice. In fact, she hardly noticed anything at all.

A lamp burst over head, showering sparks and glass onto the street below and Yaz didn’t notice choosing instead to keep walking down the street. Another streetlamp burst as she passed, and then another and another and the sun set. It was dark by the time Yaz reached the Tesco and stepped inside, making a beeline for the dairy section. She purchased a container of milk, smiling pleasantly at the cashier. 

“Lovely weather we’re having today!” she said, chipper and bright, “Don’t you think?” 

The cashier nodded absently. “Enjoy your stay!” 

“Thank you!” Yaz left the store, milk in hand. She stepped back onto the street as the faintest cracks of dawn appeared on the horizon tinging the air a faint blue. She blinked once.

A street lamp shattered and Yaz frowned. She hadn’t been in the store all night, had she?

Twice. 

She spun around to reenter the store, and found herself face to face with a solid brick wall. “Well that’s inconvenient,” she grumbled. 

Third time’s a charm, and Yaz blinked to wake up lying face down on the couch in the living room. She sat up slowly and yawned, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She glanced around the room, taking in the slumped figures of Ryan, Graham and the Doctor each safe in their individual arm chairs. 

We must have fallen asleep watching a movie, she thought, although exactly which one she couldn’t say. Her stomach rumbled and she realized how hungry she was. Yaz groaned and stood up, pushing herself off the safo and padding softly over the creaking wooden floors to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and started.

They were out of milk! How would she eat her cereal now? She sighed, realizing she would have to pop down into Town to buy some more and hurried off to get dressed. Soon she was ready and almost out the door when her gaze caught on the old stain on the striped wall paper. 

It was peeling and faded and Yaz hated it, but she had to admit it had grown on her since moving in. She frowned and rubbed at the stain with her thumb. It had been smaller the day before, hadn’t it? And on the other wall? Yaz shrugged it off and headed out the door. She must be imagining things- there was milk to be buying after all. 

Outside on the street the sun set, and then rose, and then set and rose again. But Yaz didn’t notice as she emerged blinking into the new morning sun. She set off down the street and before remembering to make sure she brought money. She patted her pockets feeling for her wallet. Nothing. 

Typical. She turned to go back in the house and grab it but found herself face to face with a solid brick wall. A buzzing noise passed through her ears and she shook head vigorously to get rid of it. What had she been doing? She frowned, trying to think back but her thoughts seemed fuzzy and sluggish. It must not have been that important then.

Yaz woke up slowly, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Pale sunlight filtered through the blinds leaving zebra stripes on the dark green wall across from her. The sun must just have risen. A few feet away the Doctor snored, and Yaz found herself smiling. It was rare that anyone was awake before the Doctor. So rare in fact, that something she wondered if the woman even slept at all.  _ So why am I awake now,  _ she wondered vaguely. 

_ That’s right, _ she remembered although not knowing how,  _ I was going to buy some milk _ . A street lamp shattered outside but Yaz paid it no attention as she got dressed for the store. Yes, milk. 

That was important, she thought. And then she stepped outside and blinked. 

* * *

  
  
  


There was a hole in her wall and Martha Jones didn’t know what to do. She had tried watching it all night to see if it moved but the most that had happened was a car alarm going off around three in the morning. That might have woken her up anyway, but right now it was feeling like she had gone without sleep for nothing. She pushed her pencil into the hole. It was about three centimeters wide and looked like someone had gotten drunk and gotten careless and accidentally punched their fist through the plaster never bothering, or caring, enough to fix it. Like the kind of hole you would find in a college dorm room. 

But this wasn’t that kind of hole. The pencil kept going and didn’t stop, it’s entire body swallowed by the wall until Martha’s hand was flush against it. There was a noise like a suction cup unsealing and it was tugged free of her grip, pulled by an unseen force into the wall. She jerked her hand away, reaching for a flashlight. She shone it in, the beam casting light into the hole but all there was was darkness. It was almost like the wall could swallow light too. 

Martha made a note of it in her head: anomaly five was the same as all the others and it was located in the middle of her kitchen. She sank to the ground feeling as if she had just gotten off night shift at the hospital. She worked in a hospital, right? The memory was foggy, like smoke slipping out of her fingers when she tried to recall it. Bright lights, clean rooms, a sterile environment. It had to be a hospital. What else could it be? It didn’t matter. Pushing her thoughts aside she moved on to Anomaly Six. 

This one was in a back alley by the waterfront. She had found it a week ago on a walk around the time the others had appeared. She didn’t dare write down her findings, keeping them all in her head. That was hard enough to keep track of as it was. She didn’t need her notes warping around her too, making it impossible to find something she wrote down but really should just have memorized. She shook her head disoriented as a wave of dizziness washed over her. The noonday sun beat overhead and Martha barely noticed. 

Then she reached Anomaly six. It was a perfectly square hole in the road where one of the paving stones had been. Carefully, she kicked a rock in and never heard it hit the bottom. Bingo. 

She sat down on a park bench, plastic cool in the evening weather, and began to think. 

And think. 

And think. 

And then she heard a voice speak out from behind her, so faint she almost missed it. “ _Hey_ ,” it said.

She whipped her head around looking for any sign of who had spoken but there was no one. A wind blew down off the water tossing leaves around, but no one there to speak. But that voice, she  _ had  _ heard it as surely as she knew her name.

Martha kicked another rock into the hole and didn’t hear it hit the bottom. Did the anomalies even have bottoms? It was possible they could go on forever, a bunch of tiny isolated voids. She had seen weirder things with the Doctor and with UNIT, so it wasn’t implausible. She added it to her list. 

The anomaly in her kitchen wall had eaten the pencil, she thought slowly, maybe this one could too. It would be another consistency between them, and she dearly needed those. Martha stood up, snatching a stick up off the ground and walked over to the hole. It was just like the one in her kitchen seeming to swallow all the light in around it, or maybe light had never been there in the first place. She poked the stick into the hole, a wild grin spreading over her face when she didn’t feel or hear it hit the bottom. She kept pushing and it kept going, which she was expecting.

Then the stick was half gone and it tugged in her hand. Martha jerked forwards, stumbling after the stick to the edge of the Anomaly. The tug on her stick surged with sudden strength, yanking it out of her hands. She gasped as her feet were pulled out from under her as the stick vanished into the dark. She gaped silently for a moment. 

That was new. None of the Anomalies had ever shown signs of action before. Something had pulled the stick in. Martha pulled herself up brushing gravel from her palms, excitement bubbling under her skin like electricity. This was  _ progress. _ She smiled as ideas began to form in her mind and she ran back home to run some tests, one step closer to escaping wherever Here was. 

* * *

  
  


The Doctor couldn’t think. Every time she tried she felt a smog covering her mind making it hard to concentrate. She brushed her teeth and chugged a glass of orange juice to jog her mind. She gagged on the sour flavor, choking it down.  _ Thirty-two multiplied by the square root of forty-seven point five is….is... _

She slammed her hand against the sink, cracking the ceramic. It hadn’t worked. That was a problem she could do in her sleep, and that trick worked perfectly fine the last few times she had needed it. Why wasn’t it working now? She racked her brain for more ideas, but came up empty. Trying to think here was like throwing a ping-pong ball at a control panel and hoping to turn on the radio. Useless. If only she knew where  _ here _ was. 

She sank down to the floor of the bathroom she didn’t remember entering, cool tiles worn slightly around the edges as if the house was old and lived in. The Doctor knew it wasn’t. This house was barely three days old and had appeared when she had. 

What had she been doing? How had they gotten here? All she could remember was a piercing shriek followed by a bright light and then nothing. She had woken up here in this house, Yaz, Ryan, and Graham with her all acting like they had lived here for ages. The Doctor rubbed her temples, and ran a hand through her hair. This place, it wasn’t  _ right _ . She could feel it in the air. 

A tingling sensation that touched every part of her skin raising goose-bumps on her arms. She would have thought it was nerves or cold, but the Doctor didn’t get cold and this definitely wasn’t nerves. It was external. She buried her head between her knees, a low moan escaping her lips. 

Outside, the birds began chirping in the predawn light. 

Something was  _ wrong. _ Something here was seriously, dangerously wrong and the Doctor couldn’t even think straight enough to see it. Or know it. 

Whatever.

She stood up and stumbled over to the sink, bracing one arm on either side. Her face was wane and pale when she met her own gaze in the mirror, slightly distorted by spots and imperfections that told her it was merely pretending to be old. 

She turned on the facet, racking her brains for something- anything she could remember. They were on the TARDIS and the light came. They had been going to…..they had been going to… the Doctor started as a cold wet sensation attacked her foot. She looked down. Water had run out all over the floor. She followed it up, up up to the sink. 

The sink was overflowing. She stepped out of the puddle and turned it off. Was the drain blocked? 

Yes.

How hadn’t she noticed the drain was blocked? 

The Doctor stepped away, rubbing her eyes leaving fuzzed afterimages of muddy blues and greens that faded within milliseconds. Outside, she could hear the crashing of waves against the shore. They didn’t live near the water, did they? She stumbled out of the bathroom feeling once again that this place was wrong. She just wished she knew how. 

In a daze, she somehow found her way to the kitchen. Yaz was sitting at the small round table, eating a bowl of cereal. She was already dressed for the day and had a newspaper open in front of her. Had that been there a second ago? 

“Morning,” she grumbled. Yaz didn’t bother looking up from her paper. 

“Morning to you too, sleepyhead,” she remarked, shoving another spoonful of cereal into her mouth. “I bought milk.” 

A milk carton appeared at her elbow. The Doctor frowned. Yaz didn’t seem to notice, happily munching away. 

“Anything interesting in that paper?” the Doctor asked. Yaz paused for a moment, putting her spoon down, letting it clank against the worn ceramic of the bowl. 

“Not much. Mr. Hopkins from down the road adopted a dog, lottery winners- no one from around here, crossword, the council’s considering some new bill about recycling, and some guys claiming to have heard a ghost down by the wharf.” 

The Doctor snapped her head up at that. “A ghost?” 

“Yes, a ghost,” she said, unbelievingly, “Disembodied voice, chills, vague but inevitable sense of dread. It’s a bit Scooby-Doo though. If you ask me, my money’s on it being some uni students out for laughs.” 

“Yes,” the Doctor muttered, “Uni students, that would make sense.” Except this place had no university.

“That definitely seems like our kinda thing,” Graham said from behind her. He hadn’t been there a second ago. 

“Sounds exciting, we should check it out,” Ryan said, appearing suddenly. He took the cereal from Yaz, pouring the last of it into his bowl. 

“Yes,” the Doctor agreed, speaking more to herself than any of the others, “We should.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, so this is intended to be confusing on purpose but hopefully it wasn't too confusing that you didn't know what was going on. I don't even like cereal that much

**Author's Note:**

> the Doctor really is having a time, huh


End file.
